London Mashed Up 1924 - 2014

Photographer Simon Smith did an amazing job of layering present-day London on images shot in 1924 by Harry B. Parkingson and Frank Miller. I discovered this on Open Culture, an online platform for free digital material. See Simon's project in this YouTube clip.

While 1924 is hardly in the nineteenth century, thankfully Gunther Barth, one of the scholars to whom this class will turn, allows us some leeway in critically capturing the moment when you can clearly see rising urban life. He offers the early nineteenth to early twentieth century window as a great place to begin if you are trying to understand the emergence of urban culture in the United States, that's for sure. To him, such a culture - which, incidentally, came after the growth of cities in Europe -  witnesses the arrival of newspapers, vaudeville houses, baseball, department stores and apartment houses. These are sites to make new discoveries about the ways in which urban people of different origins found collective meaning in their everyday lives. City-dwellers, he tells us, eased their stress by being spectators at vaudeville shows and baseball games. Some read newspapers to  learn English. Others did so to simply learn more about each other and America. Many such people were relieved to learn they were not the only ones suffering in cramped spaces, which required the construction of apartment houses where several families could live. By 1920, more Americans lived in cities than in the rural communities for the first time in U.S. history. So 1924 is more than adequate to probe the historical significance of this space.

on "seeing" cities and city people

As I prepare to teach this class again, I am more alert to how the word "city" and "urban" are used in everyday life. I increasingly find another occasion to learn something new about this space in the present and the past.

The photograph I took in Liverpool in 2011.

For example, I just returned from a second trip to a remote part of Virginia. While there, I read with new eyes a handwritten story by a man who lived in the antebellum house where I worked on the book  before me. In it, the man recalled his memories of growing up in his small town during the late nineteenth century.  Apparently, some city girls visited the town in question and said something along the lines of "What's the matter with you?" to the man, who was then a boy. The writer found this use of the word "matter" shocking. Folks in his more rural space used this word to refer to a purulent discharge from the eyes. A most trusted dictionary confirms such a usage. The writer himself used this incident to characterize urban dwellers as being both crude and fast people, traits many still associate with city folks (This is a topic that students enrolled in this course will doubtless get tired of hearing).

For now, as I return to my book in dear Tuscaloosa, after having driven part of the way back with my husband, I am reminded of how today's travelers automatically sense that cities are places in which we  are not only crude and fast, but places through which we literally move crudely and fast. Certainly I always knew we were approaching an urban area because the cars and trucks around us suddenly moved faster. Maybe the drivers just wanted to get somewhere more quickly or miss afternoon rush hour (the latter was once the case for my husband). Still, I find urban spaces, no matter how fast we moved through them, quite fascinating even if you never get off the highway.

I am now reminded of travel writer Somerset Maugham. His 1930 book  The Gentleman in the Parlour: A Record of a Journey from Rangoon to Haiphong addresses his journeys through the East. While in Thailand, he admitted that he took pleasure in feeling as many emotions as possible by simply sitting on a train. He said a depot in Pennsylvania held all the "mystery" seen in the massiveness of New York and  London. I shared this sentiment after taking a train from Oxford to Liverpool to see an exhibit in a museum. It was a characteristically rainy day in England. I stopped only to snap a photo of the harbor in Liverppool before dashing into the museum for two hours. I hurried back to the railway, content to "see" Liverpool from a distance.

seeing modern day New York through nineteenth century eyes

Today I stumbled on a New York Times story about Duane Michals, a photographer who wanted to see modern day New York City through nineteenth century eyes. He did as much by gathering images of the city after-hours. The photos brought memories of my colleague Bart Elmore's own fascination with the tensions between electronica music and photographs of present day Tuscaloosa. If observed closely, numerous buildings that existed in Tuscaloosa during the nineteenth century feel very Old World because of their European-styled architecture. Elmore pushed the envelope on such aesthetics by creating a mash up of very modern music for the soundtrack of a short students enrolled in this class last fall produced with my assistance.

Back to the New York Times story though, I was particularly struck by this image of Coney Island by Michals. It reminded me of how leisurely moments figured into the arrival of urban life. In cities like New York, people increasingly worked a set number of hours in factories and had time to do such things as visit Coney Island. Numerous individuals began to travel to the Brooklyn park, which sits on the coast of the Atlantic. As early as  the 1830s and 1840s steamships and streetcars helped reduced travel time to this part of New York.

The park's first carousel was built in 1876. This tourist attraction became  less popular after the Second World War. I have only seen it once in my life. Upon moving to the city in 2000, I wanted to drive to Coney Island. My memory is faulty, but I mostly recall seeing Russian-owned businesses, gold jewelers and dollar stores.

Brooklyn's Coney Island, 1917. Perry Casteneda Library Map Collection. University of Texas-Austin.